


Where do you go when you go quiet?

by depugnare



Series: Never Gonna Be a Whole Fic [14]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Captain America: The First Avenger, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-21
Updated: 2016-07-21
Packaged: 2018-07-25 18:42:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7543705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/depugnare/pseuds/depugnare
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is snow but it is not that dream, not the dream of watching death fall from his fingertips.</p><p> It is a memory, snow and metal frozen together, poppies with petals of blood splattered around camp.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Where do you go when you go quiet?

steve rogers lays back in the grass and dreams as the hot equatorial sun passes overhead. 

There is snow but it is not that dream, not the dream of watching death fall from his fingertips. It is a memory, snow and metal frozen together, poppies with petals of blood splattered around camp. The crunch of ice beneath his feet had sounded like knuckle bones grinding against a jaw and reminded him that there was no pause to violence war, not when the Earth was newly sown with the bones of angry men.

It is across this ground that he walks towards a tent hastily smeared with a red cross (in paint or blood, unknown) to find Bucky. Hands burned by a malfunctioning Hydra weapon, the sniper had been quiet with unbearable pain on the eight hour journey back to camp and inconsolable with rage that he was unable to curl his hands around the butt of his rifle. Steve still had the gun tucked in the crook of one arm, carefully unloaded and placed into his care with trust in the back of a rickety jeep. Now he looks for its owner inside the humid tent, warm from sick and dying bodies, and spots him, a streak of blue in a sea of green and red.

Steve carefully weaves through beds, remembers looking down at faces even younger than his own twisted in pain and wishing for his mother and her steady, soothing hands. He uses his free hand to pull a blanket over a fitfully sleeping boy who clearly lied on his enlistment form, temple wrapped in a stained bandage and hair matted with dried blood. Bucky sees him before he can say anything, and goes to turn his head so he doesn’t have to look Steve in the eye.

(Steve wants to tell him that he learns to grit his teeth and stare any confrontation in the face, but this is a memory and not a dream so Steve remains silent.)

“I cleaned it,” Steve says, adjusting the rifle in his grasp. Bucky remains turned away, jaw clenched. “Nobody’s touched it since you gave it to me. I promise I-”

“I don’t give a fuck about the gun Steve,” Bucky said, voice shaking. (Steve does not remember his voice shaking, remembers it hard as steel; but this is a dream. Not a memory.) He does not look at Steve.

“Then why-”

Bucky whips around and Steve is struck, as always, by his war eroded face. Swirls of dirt and sweat overlay pale skin and shiny scars. Deep shadows beneath his eyes that look as though they’ve tried to eat themselves, to devour what they’ve seen when both awake and asleep. He does not look like Bucky, whose face had always been angular but never like this, carved out by rivers of shadow. 

(This is how Steve remembers Bucky, jagged and sharp like exposed ribs. Concentrate hard enough and you could see his teeth, sharp and red with blood, grinding behind the flesh of his cheek.)

It is a memory and not a dream, and Steve does not remember what Bucky said, only that somehow, Steve ends up being handed a cloth and bucket by a nurse and told to help out or get out. He wipes dirt from the faces of boys barely grown into men, much too young to look so consumed. He cleans blood from the temples of men old enough to be his father, men who have already seen a terrible global war and lived to be horrified by an even greater and more terrible war. Finally, he comes back to Bucky’s cot, his friend dozing with his bandaged hands resting on his chest.

And this is where Steve is not sure it is a memory or a dream, because he gently wipes away dirt and sweat from Bucky’s face and for a moment, while nearly asleep, he sees the face of a boy unravaged by time and suffering. A chin tilted in pride instead of dissent, hair mussed by hands instead of a helmet. Skin soft, warm against his palm, brow smooth and unwrinkled. Bucky does not wake as Steve cleans him, wiping away dried blood at his throat, but when Steve reaches his bandaged hands, Bucky stills. Steve pauses at Bucky’s wrist, looking up to see Bucky staring at him. Sleepy still, Bucky smiles at him and it’s such a deep, intense look that Steve hopes no one is looking their way.

Dreaming still, Steve reaches out his hand and cradles Bucky’s right hand between his palms. The bandage is warm is and soft against his skin, the faded white of rewashed fabric. Untouched. The cleanest thing Steve has seen in this war, and yet they are still wrapped around skin desecrated by sickly blue energy. That is how Bucky has always been, something beautiful hiding something terrible.Through the bandage, Bucky gently squeezes Steve’s hand, butterfly soft. The last time the two of them touched with any kind of tenderness.

Steve opens his eyes to find the sun setting low in the sky, and rolls on his side to look through the glass to the lab where Bucky sleeps. He gets up and walks inside, making his way over to the cryochamber to press his hand against the glass. Inside, beneath stubble and lines from years passed, Bucky looks like a boy sweetly dreaming of better things, skin a healthy pink beneath a thin layer of ice and hair soft and clean. Bucky looks safe, wrapped in white and cradled in ice, his only sanctuary in the past seventy years. He looks soft and Steve yearns to hold his hand, feel that wide, strong palm beneath his fingertips and press his lips against knuckles scarred by countless fights. 

Soon.

Soon it will be a memory instead of a dream.


End file.
